


there's an art to life's distractions

by nerddowell



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ballet Dancer Loras Tyrell, Body Dysphoria, Gender Dysphoria, General Thick Idiot Renly Baratheon, M/M, Menstruation, Trans Character, Trans Loras, Trans Male Character, Welsh Renly, periods are tough on young men huh Loras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 03:30:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11820315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: Loras Tyrell is a boy and always has been, even if everyone insists on telling him otherwise.





	there's an art to life's distractions

**Author's Note:**

> This is heavily based on a) personal experience, b) a headcanon I have for canon era trans Loras, and c) the idea that ballet is something that's seen as being 'for girls' but takes a seriously badass person to be able to do. I have a friend who's an agender ballet dancer and they also partially inspired this. So, yeah, Katelynne, this is for you, even though you don't read/watch ASOIAF or GOT. Oops.
> 
> Title from Hozier's _Someone New_ (I'm obsessed with Hozier, sorry not sorry. I NEED A NEW ALBUM.)

‘ _Byddwch yn ofalus_!’ Grandma yelled from the kitchen as Loras slammed the door behind him, making the windows rattle in their frames. Grandma always insisted on speaking Welsh at home, especially now, because it was hers and their mother’s first language. Loras had made stumbling progress with Welsh since they’d moved to Holyhead when he was six, but he only spoke it when he had to and resorted to English everywhere else, where he was understood and could understand much better. Grandma was glaring at him from her armchair. He mumbled a ‘shut up,’ under his breath before forcing out a polite ‘ _Mae’n ddrwg gen i, Abain_ ,’ and stomping upstairs to his bedroom.

His room was, like many other teenagers’, his sanctuary, and after a bad day at school – which today categorically had been – he needed the winding-down time. Especially since he couldn’t discuss anything of what happened with anybody at home, not even his sister, not even Renly, who was his best friend and had been since they’d moved to Wales and Renly had tapped on the window of the car Loras was sulking in to invite him to play Harry Potter with him. Loras had thought he was mad, of course, but he’d eventually been won over by Renly’s bright smiles (and the promise of Crash Bandicoot on Renly’s PlayStation), and they’d been firm friends ever since. It was partly to do with Renly that Loras had had such a crap day.

He flopped back on his bed angrily, glowering at the ceiling and pushing his long hair out of his eyes. He hated his hair, hated how the curls brushed his delicate cheekbones and bounced on his shoulders when he ran (which he did often, pounding around the athletics track during every Games session at school and easily outstripping the others in his class, even though he was one of the smallest). He hated that his mother wouldn’t let him cut it, even though his brothers had theirs much shorter – Willas cropped close to his head, and Garlan a sort of shaggy undercut where the sides and back were short and the longer top was most often tied at the back of his head into a bun, with a froth of frizzy curls exploding out of the hair tie in all directions. (Grandma hated Garlan’s hair.)

He knew, of course, that his situation was a little different from his elder brothers’, but he still didn’t see why he had to keep his hair so long. He longed to have it cropped into a bob, or even better, into something like Garlan’s so that he didn’t have to mess with it every day trying to get it to look decent; but his mother point-blank refused to have another shaven-headed child, and his dance teacher had looked like she was going to cry when he voiced the desire to be able to cut it all off, because all the other girls in Loras’ ballet classes tied their hair up in perfect buns for practise.

Oh. That was the thing. Loras was a girl. Well, everyone else said so, anyway. He knew he wasn’t – of course not – but nobody seemed to want to listen to him about that. He’d tried telling his mother when he was four, when she first signed him and Margaery up for ballet classes in town, but she’d just laughed and told him not to be silly, and then to get his leotard on ready for class. Loras didn’t like his ballet teacher, who always called him his girl’s name – Llio, after his great-great-grandfather, who had fought in the First World War – and even mispronounced it. The one he got when they moved to Wales wasn’t much better, although at least she got the proper Welsh ‘ll’ sound, the way his mother and grandmother always said it.

He’d still not really told anyone that he was a boy, even now, nearly ten years later.

Today had been awful. First of all, Loras had had double Welsh, which had included an oral test and a written paper where he had had to explain why the preservation of the Welsh language was important. (He could see why on one hand, seeing as it contributed to the cultural identity of the Welsh people, but on the other hand, he still found it very difficult to wrap his mouth around, and he resented the fact that he wasn’t good at it. He was good at everything he did – _everything_ – except for this stupid language. Renly, who was born and raised in Wales, was fluent both in Welsh and English, and only laughed whenever Loras swallowed his pride enough to ask for help with his homework.) Then he’d fallen whilst running that afternoon and torn a huge hole in his school trousers, which would mean having to wear his detested skirt until his mother could either fix them or buy a new pair. And to top it all off, he’d gotten his period.

His mother found him, stormy-faced, sitting on the school porch waiting for her at 3pm when she came to pick him and Margaery up. She’d dropped Margie off at a friend’s and pulled into a side street for a minute, parking on a single yellow line and turning to face him in the back seat.

‘Come on, stroppy-socks. What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ he gritted out, trying to pin the hole in his trousers together with a safety pin he’d taken from Textiles class that afternoon. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Did something happen at school?’

‘No. Well, I fell again, and I’ve torn my trousers.’

‘Oh, Llio – that’s the third pair this year. I’m not buying you another pair of trousers just to have you wreck them again a month later. You can wear your skirt from now on, like your sister does.’

‘Mum!’ He stared at her, aghast. ‘I have to wear my trousers! I can’t wear a skirt. Please, please, don’t make me wear a skirt.’

‘Why not? You wear one for ballet.’

Loras did not, in fact, wear his skirt for ballet classes. The moment his mother was out of sight, he ripped his skirt off and crumpled it at the very bottom of his bag, stripping out of his leotard and pulling on a tshirt and tight-fitting shorts instead, the same as the boys’ uniform. His teacher had an argument with him about it every week, but he staunchly refused to change and, as he was easily the best dancer in the class, she couldn’t really afford to kick him out. So he practised in his shorts and tshirt, and it was the one place he finally could feel like he was at least getting to where he should be. He’d started trying to flatten his chest, buying sports bras a size too small and layering two, one on top of the other, but it made his chest hurt so much it restricted his dancing ability and he’d had to stop. It was so stupid, but he cared more about dance than anything else going on right now.

‘That’s different. That’s uniform. I have to wear it.’

‘Your school skirt is uniform too.’

‘But we’re given the _option_ of trousers. And I choose trousers. A hundred percent. A _thousand_ percent.’

His mother gave him a long, hard look before her face softened and she reached out to squeeze his shoulder. ‘Oh, honey,’ she said, a soft smile appearing on her lips, ‘this isn’t about the trousers, is it? Your body’s changing.’

‘Mum, no–’

‘It’s completely normal to be frightened the first time, sweetheart. Blood from anywhere can be scary when it’s unexpected. But this is a good thing. You’re becoming a woman! You’re blossoming into a beautiful young lady, Llio, and this is just the first step. You’re later than your sister was, but that’s nothing to worry about. It’s nothing to be frightened of, Llio. I promise.’

Loras stared at her, fury roiling inside him. How could anyone get him so wrong? How could anyone who was supposed to know him so well – who had given birth to him, even, who had carried him for nine months and knew him more intimately than anyone else in the world, except maybe his sister – get this so terribly, catastrophically wrong?

The whole problem was that Loras was becoming a woman. He was getting his period, he’d soon have breasts he couldn’t hide beneath a decent sports bra, and he was already showing signs of getting his mother’s soft, Marilyn Monroe-esque curves. He measured himself daily, desperate to push past the five-foot mark, to catch up with the boys in his class. He’d even started drinking protein shakes after ballet, hoping it’d help him gain muscle and maybe grow a few more inches. He spent his life at the moment in a state of complete, mind-numbing panic that this was even happening to him, because it _shouldn’t be happening to him_.

Suddenly he remembered one afternoon from when he was younger, just before they moved to Wales, when Loras came inside from playing at soldiers in the garden and he was confused to find his mother in his bedroom. She taking things out of his chest of drawers and putting them in Garlan’s old duffel bag, and he panicked; he couldn’t have her in his drawers. That was where he hid all of his secret things, his treasures, like the piece of green sea glass he found on holiday last year, the Spider-Man comic book he’d taken from Garlan’s bedside table, and the lock of hair he’d cut off and tied up with a piece of string when Margaery told him that’s what witches do to make spells that grant wishes. (He had a very specific wish he needed granting as soon as possible, but he couldn’t tell anybody about it or else it wouldn’t come true.)

The wish had been, _I wish I wake up tomorrow and I’m a boy_.

Obviously, it had never come true. Instead, he’d ended up with a body that betrayed him more and more the older he got, and he was so frightened of the changes happening to it that he felt physically sick. His mother didn’t get it, his family didn’t get it, not even Renly got it. Renly had never treated Loras like a girl, exactly, but the older he’d gotten, the more he’d started looking shy whenever Loras took his top off when they went swimming at the beach, or whenever they roughhoused on the bed and Renly accidentally felt the softness on Loras’ chest. That always made Loras pull away, his cheeks flaming with shame, and glare at Renly like it was his fault Loras was like this, even though he knew it wasn’t really. Renly had nothing to do with the way Loras had been made, but sometimes, when Loras was feeling particularly hostile towards himself, he was an easy scapegoat.

His mother was still carrying on, so Loras simply climbed out of the car, slammed the door behind him, and stormed off towards home. He’d slammed the front door of the house when he got in, too, Grandma had yelled at him, and then here we are. Back to the start.

See, the other things his mother had been saying were about how he would make a pretty girlfriend for any man lucky enough to win his affections. His mother had noticed that Loras was ‘sweet on’ (to use her words) ‘that handsome lad down the road’ (meaning Renly). Loras had told her she didn’t know what she was talking about, but in truth, she wasn’t wrong. He did like Renly an awful lot, and the more of each other they’d seen as they grew up, the more he’d allowed himself to get caught up in wistful what-ifs. What if we did get married when we were older? They could have a big wedding, with Loras in a dress (if that’s what marrying Renly required, then he would suffer it for one afternoon), and then they could be together forever. They’d get married, live in his old house in Kent and go hiking in Snowdonia and the Brecon Beacons on holidays. They’d have children, if Renly wanted them, or dogs, if not. And Loras would never wear a dress again, ever in his life, because Renly would understand and not push him. And if Loras told him he was a boy later, then there was nothing anyone could do about it, because they would be already married.

That was, until Renly told him that afternoon, behind the bike sheds – clammy and whey-faced, shaking with nerves – that he was gay. As in, he liked boys, and only boys. As in, he (presumably) liked boys with penises, which is what 100% of the gay men of Loras’ experience liked.

And Loras’ heart had sunk through the floor to the centre of the earth.

He’d nodded mechanically, and when Renly pushed him to ‘Say something, Llio, put me out of my misery!’, he’d said ‘Okay. That’s fine, I suppose. I mean, I don’t care. I mean, I don’t… I won’t think bad of you because of that. You’re my best friend.’ And it was true. He didn’t, could never, think badly of Renly for something he couldn’t change about himself. He was more angry at himself, at whatever cosmic joke had been played on him that he was a boy, in love with another boy who liked boys but who would never see him as a boy because outwardly he was a girl. Loras had never before even contemplated suicide, but that was a moment that he wanted to just… not exist.

Renly, however, was oblivious to Loras’ thoughts, and had broken into a megawatt smile and clapped Loras on the back, pulling him into a hug. He’d squeezed him tight for a moment and then let him go, laughing, ‘Don’t worry, no hetero,’ and Loras had forced a smile and inwardly wished for the black hole inside his chest to just collapse in on itself and swallow him up entirely. Reduce him to nothing.

* * *

The dance studio was empty when he dropped his bag by the door, locking the studio and staring at his reflection in the mirrors on the walls. He stared at himself for a long time, his hair down over his shoulders, his plain white tshirt, his tights. The slight bulge at his chest, small but present. The lack of a bulge down below, where his tights were smooth. He swallowed hard, and sat on the floor to put on his shoes. Pulling them on, he rubbed at his toes, the calluses and blisters from years of hard daily dancing, of pointe work and delicate fluttering and, privately, the forceful, soaring leaps and landings of every male ballet routine he could find. Today he’d come to practise something specific.

He dug his iPod out of his back and plugged it into the stereo system, finding the right song and hitting play. At first he listened to it a few times, letting the rough, whiskey-toned vocals wash over him, feeling his whole body tense and relax with the flow of the music. He stood stock-still in the centre of the room, breathing in and out, listening hard, until the song finished. The stereo made a soft clicking noise and the song started again, and this time, Loras started to move.

At first, he just practised positions, moving from first to third to fifth fluidly, demi-pliés and battement tendus, all the while listening to the song, losing himself in the music and the easy rhythm of the practise steps. When the music ended again, he knelt down on the floor, curling in on himself, head in his hands. The music started, and he could feel what was coming throb in his ears, the spur of inner momentum pushing him into action. He pushed himself up on one hand, flinging the other arm into the air, straight as an arrow from shoulder to fingertips, stretching his unbent leg out and pointing his toes; his head thrown back and his chest already heaving, but his mind was focused purely on the dance. There was a sort of choreo trying to play itself out in his head, but instead he allowed his body to move as it wanted, and threw himself into a grand cabriole, arms forward, to land carefully and roll onto his back. The music built, more and more, until the chorus, at which point he did a half turn before launching into a grand jeté, pirouetting in midair.

He was breathing hard, jumping again and landing to transition to an arabesque, holding every limb perfect, knee straight, on demi-pointe since he hadn’t got his pointe shoes on. (And only girls danced en pointe anyway.) He threw himself into leap after leap, pushing himself harder and harder, breathing becoming strained. His chest ached in his double sports bras, but he ignored it, forcing himself higher. In the air, it felt as though he had wings, as though, for a moment, he was weightless, suspended, hanging there in an invisible harness. And then he had to land, which although he did it perfectly – no twisted ankles or otherwise injured parts of his person – he wished for a moment he hadn’t. He’d jumped so high it was as though he’d had wings.

He was reminded then of another game he and Renly had played as children, tying towels around their necks as capes and jumping out of the tree in Renly’s garden onto the trampoline. Loras had bounced almost as high then, so high he’d thought he’d be able to touch the clouds above them. Renly was sure he’d do the same, but instead he’d landed on the trampoline and been thrown off, where he’d broken his arm on the rocky ground and Loras had had to run back and fetch his mother to take Renly to hospital. He’d ended up with a bright blue cast on his arm for three weeks, and Loras had still felt heinously guilty for ages afterwards even though the game had been Renly’s idea in the first place.

‘I just wanted to know what it would be like to fly,’ he’d told Loras’ mother, and she’d shaken her head at him, enveloping him in a hug.

Loras flung himself across the studio, one foot dragging lightly over the floor, to thud against the mirror, grasping the bar and staring at his own face. Was it his, really? He saw a stranger in the mirror, for all that he knew it was him. A girl, pretty by conventional standards; a girl who could be his sister, but not himself. Wide, long-lashed brown eyes, curly brown hair in a tangle, freckles over her nose, the crooked tooth peeking out from behind its straight-sitting neighbour. Her face, flushed and sweaty. He couldn’t make the connection. He took it in for several long seconds before turning away, taking off his tshirt and wiping his face, hitting stop on the music. He couldn’t take this any longer. Something would have to change.

* * *

Psyching himself up to knock on Renly’s door took a long time. Loras stood on the porch for nearly ten minutes, aware of the sound of the waves rasping against the beach in the distance, the screaming of gulls over his head, the stinging in his fingers where he’d bitten his nails almost down to the quick. He’d made the decision, that today was the day, and he was starting here, at what felt like the very beginning. He smoothed his tshirt down awkwardly, biting his lip, and quickly knocked before he could chicken out. He heard Renly’s cheerful voice yell, ‘Come in!’, and stepped over the threshold. The house smelt of burning food, which meant that Renly had most likely attempted – and failed – to make dinner again. His friend’s voice was coming from upstairs, meaning he was likely in his bedroom, where Robert’s Xbox One had been stolen and set up. Loras headed up the stairs and joined Renly in his room.

‘Pull up a beanbag,’ Renly offered, gesturing to an empty seat at his side, and Loras sank down into it, trying to ignore how his heart stuttered in his chest and his stomach, already full of butterflies, developed a full-blown tornado in Renly’s presence. He couldn’t breathe, and it had nothing to do with the tightness of the bandages – slipped in amongst the groceries that week for an imagined ballet injury – around his chest. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing was coming out. Renly turned to look at him, and his eyes widened.

‘Wow,’ was all he said for a long time, staring at the new, short crop of hair hanging to Loras’ chin. It was untidy, ragged – a result of Loras cutting it himself, with a pair of scissors, in the bathroom mirror – but Loras couldn’t get over how much better he felt without it. His whole body felt lighter, as though shedding what felt like half a stone in loose brown curls had allowed him to move and breathe properly for the first time in his life. He pushed his hair nervously behind his ears, still unused to the way his fingers found air too quickly, and gestured to the screen.

‘You’re getting killed.’

‘You cut your hair,’ Renly said stupidly, reaching out to touch it before yanking his hand away quickly. ‘It looks…’

‘Rubbish?’

‘No. No, it looks really good. It suits you.’ He smiled, finally, and paused the game to inspect it closer. ‘I can see your face now.’

‘Lucky you,’ Loras teased, expecting Renly to laugh, but his friend just nodded.

‘Lucky me.’

A beat of silence passed, both of them just staring at one another. Renly was the first to look away from where he’d been gazing at a curl hanging into Loras’ left eye, too short to push behind his ear but too long to lie comfortably against his head. There was an expression of longing on his face, as though he wanted nothing more than to push it out of the way to see Loras better, or else it was an expression of vague nausea that implied he was going to be sick sometime in the very near future. Loras hoped he wasn’t going to be vomited on.

‘I actually wanted to talk to you about something,’ he said, running a hand through his hair. Renly’s eyes snapped back to his, a quick tremor running through his body, and he gave Loras a slightly forced smile.

‘Sure.’

‘It’s… I’ve not told anybody this, okay? Not even my sister.’ He could see the surprise on Renly’s face. Margaery was and always had been Loras’ primary confidante, but this was something he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell her yet. She’d always treated him more like a big brother than anything else, and he knew he was her favourite out of Willas, Garlan and himself, the same as he was his father’s favourite – but it felt a little like betraying her, in the strangest way.

Renly nodded.

‘I’m… I’m a boy.’

‘What?’

‘I’m a boy, Ren. I’m not Llio, I’m Loras. I’ve always been a boy. I’m trans.’ He found a second wind of courage and squared his shoulders, tilting his chin up. ‘And I don’t care if you don’t like it, or if you think I’m a freak or some sort of pervert, because I’ve been honest with you and if you can’t handle it then I can’t be friends with you.’

He desperately hoped Renly would be okay with it. Imagining any sort of reaction beyond the positive – beyond an ‘Of course you’re a boy, Loras, I’ve always known you were a boy,’ or, at a push, ‘Okay, that sort of explains a lot,’ – was too painful to contemplate. As far as Loras was concerned, Renly almost owed it to him to be okay with it. When Renly had told Loras he was gay, there had been no freak-out on Loras’ part, no matter how much it hurt to think about. The idea that he might have found Renly’s sexuality a dealbreaker in their friendship had never even occurred to Loras, because he was ‘so in love with Renly it was nauseating to witness’ (Margaery’s words this time. She was eloquent for a twelve-year-old). He watched Renly’s face curiously for clues, and felt his stomach do a flip as Renly went very pale.

‘A… a boy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Loras sighed heavily, shaking his head. ‘Neither do I. It’s just what happened.’

‘So your name is Loras now?’ Renly asked, running an anxious hand through his own hair. Loras nodded.

‘You know I’m going to screw this up at some point, right?’ Renly asked nervously. ‘I mean, Stannis is always telling me how I’ve got chronic foot-in-mouth most of the time, and I really am not sure how to deal with all of this, whatever it is, but. As long as I can still kick your arse at Call of Duty, we’re good.’

Loras cracked a grin, his heart soaring. ‘You’re on,’ he growled, grabbing a controller, and restarted the game, shooting Renly’s character with a crow of laughter before his friend even had chance to refocus on the game. Renly gave a howl of outrage at the injustice of this behaviour and chased Loras’ character across the battlefield, peppering his half of the screen with gunshots, and Loras bumped their shoulders together, grinning at him and allowing him a charity hit just so he wouldn’t bitch for the rest of the game.

**Author's Note:**

> The dance I'm imagining Loras doing in the studio is [this amazing piece of art by Sergei Polunin to Hozier's _Take Me To Church_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-tW0CkvdDI). I am obsessed with this video and I wish I could dance like him. Sadly I got kicked out of ballet classes age 5 for kicking the teacher with tap shoes on, and my mother thought it best not to put me into any other classes and risk a repeat performance, so I missed my chance. Boo.


End file.
